NEVER BECOME RICH

“Never become rich” 

Isabelle Rozenbaumas – YIVO March 2

Microphone check: "Papa, do you hear me"?

Thank you Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Samuel Kassow for shedding light on my father’s book. Always learning from you. A great yeshkoyekh to Jane Tuszinski and Alex Weiser for organizing this event, and Sandra Chiritescu for running the Power point and your precious help. 

I want to praise the translator Jonathan Yank Layton. For my Meyerowitz family – sponsoring the event in memory of their father Max, I have a love without borders and beyond words, going back to our parents affection. But how can I thank enough my amazing daughter Eléonore Biezunski for the artistic direction of the event? 

I would like to express my gratitude to Syracuse University Press and in particular to Ken Frieden for publishing this young worker’s memoir. Being published by a a university press would have been for Moishe a motive for pride — and I will not keep it a secret – for me as well. I also want thank YIVO, my spiritual home in the world, and Jonathan Brent, for hosting this event.

Most of us have had or have a father and a mother.

Not all of us though had a father who used to say “Never become rich”. Did I take this prescription too seriously? Did I interpret a zifts, a sigh, as a political statement? Growing up in my parent’s house, I have been educated as if poverty and hardship were knowledge, almost science. What should I do with that today?

Apprenticeship may be a key word to understanding my father’s life. To which we can add necessity, hard work, trial, poverty and – thanks gotenyu in himl – resourcefulness.

My father Moishe became an apprentice at age 10. Born on May Day 1922, he liked to joke about the proletarian fate promised to him at birth.

My father didn’t begin his life as an orem kind – a poor child, nor as an abandoned one. But both of these experiences were in store for him. When his own father left the country after bankruptcy in the wake of the Great Depression, Moishe became der breyt-geber, the bread-winner of the family. His mother gave birth to a fourth boy that my grand-father would never get to know. And while Moishe struggled for subsistance and became a qualified tailor, cataclysmic historical events were in the offing. 

From his fidgety childhood in Jewish Lithuania, where stealing apples from church orchards was his favorite escapade, Moishe does not want to paint an idealized portrait. As we follow his steps in the kheyder, among his family and playmates, as an apprentice, and as a laboring teenager, we get a precise and moving portrait of the lives of working-class Jewish youth in Telz/Telšiai, a religious town celebrated for its yeshiva. 

When the war broke out, Moishe fled Lithuania alone. The very few moments in the book where he evokes the last time he saw his mother and brothers, and his return to Telz after the war are full of emotional self-restraint. He followed a voice that drove him onto the roads, heading away from the bombings. Where was this voice coming from ? In another presentation about his mother’s part in Moishe’s specific brand of intelligence, I linked Ulysses with the Greek feminine figure of Metis. Fraught experiences took him across Russia and among the refugees wandering through Central Asia, where he ends up starved and enslaved in an Uzbek kolkhoz. Recovering from typhus, he enlists in the 16th Lithuanian division of the Soviet Army, rapidly joining a reconnaissance unit where his ingenuity in defying danger is a key to his unlikely survival.

Entendement

Somewhere in his early writing Moishe ponders on what it is to understand – using the French word “entendement". Moishe had an acute awareness that a narrative could grow from arranging and reconstructing facts from hearsay. In his foreword he mentions how crucial it was for him to write from his “personal” and unique perspective, from what he saw and what he was a direct witness to, especially as he took up his pen decades after the events. Nevertheless, his post-war education permeates beneath the relatively simple surface of chronological construction there is always a concern for context. When useful for his intended reader (typically a child, a grand-child or a great grand-child) Moishe supplies essential geographical and cultural notions, to which I added to meet the requirements of this University Press edition. 

Most importantly the ongoing conversation between tradition and politics was the fabric of his thought. How come? And why was that?

Moishe's curiosity extended to every realm of intellect and culture. His taste for “The Complete Works of so an so…”  was no doubt shaped by the formal Marxist-Leninist method of study. For young party cadres, schools were opened everywhere in the Soviet Union, especially in the newly established Socialist Republics like Lithuania. His description of the economic chaos{p. 138-139} and of the hypocrisy of the Soviet system (mainly the Party-unions mechanism) owes a lot to the literacy and knowledge he gathered in these schools combined with his power of meticulous observation, not to mention a devastating sense of derision, an eye for absurdity… à la Boulgakov {p.133}

“We were taught basic subjects, like Russian, some Lithuanian, and last but not least Marxism-Leninism and party history. Russian geography and the geography of the Eastern countries was one of the fundamental subjects.We studied and studied Marx’s Capital over and over again, as if it were the Bible; the twenty volumes of Lenin’s Complete Works; and Stalin’s twelve tomes. Among those graduates who finished these courses at the party school, a few were chosen to attend further classes. They were designated to benefit, again for four years, from the evening courses at the Marxist-Leninist University that was in every Soviet republic. Once again I had the unbelievable luck of being selected. In spite of the propaganda, the lies, and the ideology, the eight years spent in the midst of this indoctrination brought me knowledge of economics, politics, and even philosophy. Naturally, only materialist philosophers were studied, and not all of them, either. All in all, having access to an education, however partial and biased, finding myself with people who knew about things of which I was ignorant, discussing with them subjects that had been unthinkable beforehand, led me to think for myself, to pose new questions, and, finally, to a fundamental self-reassessment.” (p. 137)

But his own thirst for knowledge was motivated even more by his desire to make sense of his life's tribulations, to understand his ordeals in time of war, and his survival as his family was engulfed in the hurbn. If only through the materialist critiques of it, metaphysics was floating in the air. So it shouldn’t be surprising that in his later life, having journeyed on his odyssey and traversed through philosophy, he returned to the religion of his pious mother. 

Compassion, empathy, humanity

Never did Moishe forget the long years providing for his family while learning a trade. He always emphasized these formative years when he observed the balebos, the street, the town, the Jewish society from the bottom up. He never forgot to speak of the most vulnerable, the poorest of the poor, the bearers of the heavy burden of long hours of work, the paupers at the border of misery and even of sanity{p.24-25}.

Almost every episode of the book involves these heartfelt notations about the condition of the downtrodden, be it about skating or swimming with kids, eating on Shabbes {p.10}, the picturesque beauty of the town and its people. He describes the butchers and other shopkeepers and their system of credit, the hovels where the indigent lived, the religiosity of the Jewish population {p.24-25}, the bustle of the market square and the price of the herring. 

He also evokes the personal dignity of Mere-Khaye, his mother, when their impoverished family couldn’t afford the most necessary products and she had to make the decision to place Moishe into an apprenticeship. Through the book the social question is interwoven with… almost everything, from relations with girls to religion and of course politics.

My father never lost his sense of humanity. My cousin Cyril Meyerowitz who had a warm relationship with Moishe writes to me: 

"His ability to develop relationships and attachments with individuals was fundamental to his survival. He writes appreciatively that his travel partner had skills he did not have and that those skills were essential to his survival. [One wonders how much his own survival instinct, his pragmatism or his relational skills played a part.] He doesn’t write about what attributes he brought to that survival fight that were equally important to his partner and their collective survival."

The only war action he describes in graphic detail is going to bring back a wounded camarade across the enemy line, covered by a diversion of fire. He utters his muffled pain when he finally brought back the young man on his shoulders, dead, leaving behind a trail of blood on the white snow. The interdependence and solidarity of elite reconnaissance unit members was more than iron “discipline, obedience and responsibility” instilled by the army. For Moishe, it was very much the image of what a mentsh ought to do in a given situation.

A sensitive reader and intellectual

Already in Vilna after the war, my father had read the Russian classics, Dostoïevski, Gogol, Tolstoï, Pushkin, Tourgeniev, and also the naturalist literature in translation, Dickens, Zola, Balzac. He appreciated the roman picaresque of Cervantes and Dante’s complex vision of the world, while philosophy appealed very much to him. Most of all he liked historical frescoes and Alexandre Dumas complete works occupied a respectable place in his small library. As soon as he discovered it, he developed a real love for classical music. I cannot get rid of a few recorded audio-cassette cards of concerts and operas, where he has documented systematically the names of the composer, the conductor, the singers, the pieces played, and every detail a cataloguer classifying for archival purpose would record. 

My mother Rosa, Michel Biezunski, and Moishe reading some text in our Paris apartment May 1996

Years passed and I became close to and then assistant to my teacher, the French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, books circulated between our houses. My father read everything systematically and with delight. From social sciences, history of Judaism to the literature of Mitel Europa, and from psychoanalyses to history of science, Moishe read, absorbed and discussed everything with me. 

He was a genuine literature lover. Knowing how much he had appreciated the Complete Works of Kafka, I was still surprised how much he was hooked on Leo Perutz, and later on the cryptic novels of Bruno Shulz. At the end of his life when he was fighting with his language skills and Alzheimers, I read him poetry in Yiddish, Sutzkever's Grin Akvarium and its French translation by Batia Baum. Later, when he was in a nursing home and things were getting worse, he never lost his sense of irony and laughed with pleasure at Der Kleyner Prints, the Yiddish translation by Sholem Lerman. Especially at the prejudice of the scientific community that needs the Turkish astronomer to come back in occidental guise to record his discovery of the Asteroid B612. Since then, I call the Yiddish planet, Astero-yid B612.

I may have been the main beneficiary of Moishe's conversational skills in discussing an array of historical, literary, philosophical and political questions. Our brains and hearts seem to have been in tune. In the words of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, I may have been the perfect daughter for the perfect father. Perhaps I had arrived at exactly the right moment, in a mazldiker sho, after the “Doctors' Plot” and a fortnight after Staline’s death, precisely when Moishe started having doubts about his ideal. But clearly he had nourished doubts about the entire system much earlier… because as he writes: 

"The risks of the war had been enough for me, and I came to reject this life, both dishonest and perilous, even though the whole society was gangrenous. As for the workers, they could be arrested for a trifle, being imprisoned for seven years just for being found leaving the factory with a spool of thread. A cadre occupying a high-level post could juggle truckloads without getting caught, because the system was corrupt and rotten. I had decided to become a mentsh again, an upright, no-tricks man, an honest worker who earned his living with his hands."{p.153}

A talent for love

When my father told us "Never become rich", he meant: "Don't do like my father who abandoned me/us to run after fortune, don't turn away your face from me as soon as you achieve opulence (I never did), don't abandon me in my old age because your human values were overwhelmed by materialist concerns". Papa's politics, always consistent, were that a part of the population cannot be "abandoned" on the side of the road. From the infinite source of love he received from his mother whose authority he never questioned, he poured onto us an endless amount of this intangible legacy. Like our Jewish god, this love is impalpable and invisible, you can only feel it. He wanted us and our offspring to be aware that THAT was our most precious possession and that in fact we possess nothing but that love and fondamental sense of humanity and we can bequeath nothing else that is indestructible. 

And as Sacha, mayn bruderl, der eyntsiker mit vemen ikh hob zikh geteylt a tate-mame, says in French: ""notre richesse n'est pas matérielle""

Bien vu, well said bruderl.

My brother Sacha made this photo... From right to left: Moishe, his grand-daughter Mélinée, Sharon Meyerowitz Kreitzer, Shuli Meyerowitz, Micheline my sister-in-law, myself (laughing), Cyril Meyerowitz, Rose my mother, Mel Kreitzer.
Although out of focus, this photo shows how loving and full heartedly caring was my father.